How to Swipe Great Titles … and Use Them On YOUR Blog

How often do you sit down to write a post, only to draw a complete blank?

Blogging prompts can be really helpful if you’re stuck for ideas. Sometimes, though, what you’re struggling most with us coming up with a title.

What you want is a ready-made title template: one that you know will hit the mark with readers, and that will help you create a well-structured post.

The great news is that you can find those templates all over the place, on any popular blog you read. Just take a great title of theirs … and spin it into your own.

But Is it OK to Use Someone Else’s Title?

Some bloggers worry that using someone else’s title is unethical, or even illegal.

The truth is, it’s neither. Legally, there’s no copyright on titles – and given that many blog post titles follow tried-and-tested formulas, there are inevitably lots of posts with very similar titles anyway.

Morally … might be a greyer area. If you’ve swiped a particularly unusual title, you may want to link to the original post to acknowledge it. If you think someone might mind you borrowing from them, it never hurts to ask.

Many bloggers, though, freely borrow other people’s titles and even post structures: it’s common practice, even at the highest levels of blogging. (Check out this account from Jon Morrow about how one of his most popular posts was heavily based on one of Brian Clark’s.)

However …. as with any area of blogging, don’t do something that you feel personally uncomfortable with. If your title seems a bit too close to an unusual original title, you might want to have a rethink.

How to Find a Great Title

If you read blogs (and hopefully you do!), then great titles are all around you. Some especially good places to look are:

Twitter – what post titles have stood out to you recently? Which ones did you click on?

“Popular post” lists – you can find these on many blogs, often in the sidebar. Posts don’t generally become popular unless they have a reasonably good title!

Magazines – editors know all about creating titles that grab attention on the cover. (Note, for instance, how often they use numbers.)

It’s often a good idea to seek out blogs outside your own niche: this can bring in fresh title ideas, and it also forces you to change at least a few words of each title. If you blog about WordPress, for instance, you might find inspiration on a parenting blog … or vice versa!

How to Twist That Title

Once you’ve found a title, it’s fairly straightforward to “twist” it and make it your own. You can do one – or all! – of these:

Occasionally, a title might use a particularly significant number – e.g. the title of my post “7 Habits of Serious Writers” was inspired by Stephen Covey’s book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. (I’ve also seen a lot of posts that are the “Ten Commandments of…”) If that’s the case for your borrowed title, you’ll probably want to keep the number the same.

#3 Change the Adjectives

Many titles include a modifying word, like “powerful” or “secret” or “inspiring” or “easy” – and often, you can create a quite different feel for your post by switching this word.

Making Several Changes to Create a Title that Truly Fits Your Blog

Often, you’ll want to make several changes at once to a title … and in the examples above, you can see that it’s often appropriate to change a couple of different things (e.g. the topic of a list post and the number of items in it).

Here are a few examples of titles that look quite different after being changed in several ways … each time, though, the underlying structure of the title remains the same.

Writing great titles isn’t easy – but you can take a huge shortcut by borrowing an existing structure, rather than trying to re-invent the wheel.

Plus, the more titles you study and tweak, the more you’ll get to grips with what makes a title work … and one day, other bloggers will be borrowing from you!

About Ali Luke

Ali Luke blogs about the art, craft and business of writing at
Aliventures. She has two free ebooks on blogging,
Ten Powerful Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Stronger
and
Ten Easy Ways to Attract Readers to Your Blog … And Keep Them There.
To get your copies of those, just
sign up for her weekly e-newsletter (also free!) here.

Although I do browse current sites with great headlines that get clicks, like Buzzfeed and Refinery29 for the headlines and for inspiration… I often find that I get more out of my old Gene Schwartz swipe file or the ads covered in “How To Write A Good Advertisement” by Victor Schwab.

The older language and lack of click-bait spammy-ness allows my brain to synthesize them easier… Sometimes it is the off the wall ones for a totally different niche that really inspire me for a great title. #OldSchoolCool

I bookmarked this article when I came across it last month because I thought it was interesting – still do – but now I’m conflicted.

I am seeing more and more people cross the ethics line and it’s really bothering me. Take the title issue – I just read an article with the title Purple Cow. Of course, this is the same title as Seth Godin’s book, and in fact, the imagery and content of the article are remarkably similar to the book – but the ideas and advice are presented as the authors.

A couple of weeks ago a blogger in a group I belong to posted an article and I was stunned to see that the image he used was none other than the Facebook banner image of Darren Rouse! I contacted the manager of the group and expressed my concern – it’s bad enough to use someone’s image without permission, but when that person actually happens to be in it that takes it to a whole different level. I was told it’s no big deal, don’t worry about it. At my insistence they finally (I’m told) at least gave Problogger photo credit.

Certainly, neither of these examples is critical in the big scheme of things, but the lines are clearly shifting for what is considered ethically acceptable and I can’t help but wonder where we’re heading in the future.